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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9844034" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I have studied college-junior level math and gotten A or B grades. I have tutored math for people of all ages, professionally, for years. The most challenging tutees are always the adult learners building up their foundational math skills.What more would you need for me to prove my credentials? Doing integrals in my head? I've done that. I'm too rusty to do it now, but I used to, e.g. back in my optics class. I can do some fiendishly difficult mathematics.But keeping straight in my head that a +4 bonus to THAC0 from a magic weapon means my THAC0 goes from -3 to -7, and thus I can hit a target with AC of...what? Assuming I roll 10, with a THAC0 of -7, I can hit an AC of -7-10 = -17.And every single time I have to do these mental gymnastics to get useful information out. Doubly so because, if I were actually playing at a real table, most GMs will NEVER tell you a monster's AC, so you're doing Die + [UNKNOWN] >= THAC0.In every possible way except raw mathematical equivalence, ascending AC and positive hit bonuses are superior to descending AC and negative hit bonuses. Because people think additively better than they think subtractively, and people instinctively recognize "make number go up" as an improvement. The mere fact that AC was attempting to be descending because it was ordinal data from the beginning, and we never EVER should have been doing arithmetic with it!Like literally. The reason AC is descending is--solely and exclusively--because it was meant to be understood as "AC1 = First-class armor, AC2 = Second-class armor", etc. As in, the best class there is, then the second-best, then the third-best, and so on. But shields immediately destroy that, because they improve your armor class by 1, which means shields are not ordinal data at all, they're cardinal data, numbers that fit on a number line with clean, fixed separations. (Another term for this is "ratio" data.) You have one point's worth of armor, not you have first-class armor. That, that thing right there, is precisely what made (and makes) THAC0, and more generally descending AC, such a bugaboo for so many people, myself included.</blockquote>

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